Arts Week with Judy Murphy

There aren’t many towns in Ireland that can boast of having two winners of the Lawrence O’Shaughnessy Award, a prestigious prize for Irish poets awarded by St Thomas University of Minnesota, USA.

Luke Morgan laughs and says “Oughterard can”.

The winner of this year’s award, Luke is referring to himself and to previous recipient Louis de Paor, who is originally from Cork but a longterm resident of Oughterard.

And while Oughterard’s status might be unusual, so too is Luke’s because he’s just 30 and this prize is normally given to writers who are older. Former winners include Moya Cannon and Paula Meehan as well as the late Eavan Boland and Gerald Dawe.

Luke is currently at the Cannes Film Festival where he’s wearing his other hat as a film-maker, promoting two projects-in-development, supported by funding bodies including Screen Ireland and Creative Europe Media. He and his brother, composer and musician Jake Morgan, run the award-winning Morgan Brothers production company responsible for works including the bilingual Froggie, a hit at last year’s Galway Film Fleadh.

“There’s no money in poetry or composing music,” Luke laughs about being in the film business. But, he adds “we are passionate about stories and composing music and the journey of the story”.

While film and poetry are very different, “both are image-based and have to be efficient at communicating something with just an image”.

Luke travelled to the US last month to receive the 28th Lawrence O’Shaughnessy Award, giving interviews, workshops and readings at St Thomas’s Center for Irish Studies and for Minnesota’s Twin Cities.

He was mostly reading from his latest collection, Blood Atlas, published by Arlen House, which fellow poet Molly Twomey will officially launch this Friday, May 23, at the city’s Charlie Byrne’s Bookshop.

“It was good practice for the launch,” he says of the experience, adding that he amazed by the regard for Irish poetry in Minnesota.

“If you throw a stone in Galway, you’re going to hit a poet. It’s less special here because there are so many of us doing it. You feel like a rockstar there and then you come back to Galway and you’re reading for your mother and brother!” He laughs.

But poetry is his calling and in his third collection, he explores family lineage, language and legacy, as well as the human body itself.

The Oughterard man was just 22 when his first book Honest Walls was published, also by Arlen House.

“I wanted to be a published writer and thought it would open doors. But many debut collections become drops in an ocean,” he says of his first book.

Pictured: Luke Morgan after receiving the Lawrence O’Shaughnessy Poetry Award, with Dr David Gardiner, University of St Thomas, Minnesota (left), and the Consul General of Ireland in Chicago Brian Cahalane.